Sally pummels Alabama with heavy rain, outages
SOME 150,000 homes and businesses had lost electricity by early Wednesday, according to the poweroutage.us site. A curfew was called in the coastal Alabama city of Gulf Shores due to lifethreatening conditions.
Pensacola (US), Sept. 16: Hurricane Sally made landfall Wednesday near Gulf Shores, Alabama, as a Category 2 storm, pushing a surge of ocean water onto the coast and dumping torrential rain that forecasters said would cause dangerous flooding from the Florida Panhandle to Mississippi and well inland in the days ahead.
Moving at an agonisingly slow 3 mph, Sally finally came ashore at 4:45 a.m. local time with top winds of 105 mph (165 kmh), the National Hurricane Center said. Sally’s northern eyewall had raked the Gulf Coast with hurricane-force winds and rain from Pensacola Beach, Florida, westward to Dauphin Island, Alabama, for hours before its centre finally hit land.
Some 150,000 homes and businesses had lost electricity by early Wednesday, according to the poweroutage.us site. A curfew was called in the coastal Alabama city of Gulf Shores due to lifethreatening conditions.
In the Panhandle’s
Escambia County, Chief Sheriff ’s Deputy Chip Simmons vowed to keep deputies out with residents as long as physically possible.
The county includes Pensacola, one of the largest cities on the Gulf Coast. “The sheriff ’s office will be there until we can no longer safely be out there, and then and only then will we pull our deputies in,” Simmons said at a storm briefing late Tuesday. This for a storm that, during the weekend, appeared to be headed for New Orleans. “Obviously this shows what we’ve known for a long time with storms — they are unpredictable,” Pensacola Mayor Grover Robinson IV said. Stacy Stewart, a senior specialist with the hurricane centre, said the rainfall will be “catastrophic and life threatening” over portions of the Gulf Coast, Florida panhandle and southeastern Alabama, and will continue well after landfall, with the storm producing heavy rainfall Wednesday night and Thursday over portions of central and southern Georgia.
Sally was a rare storm that could make history, said Ed Rappaport, deputy director of the hurricane center. “Sally has a characteristic that isn’t often seen and that’s a slow forward speed and that’s going to exacerbate the flooding,” Rappaport said.
He likened the storm’s slow progression to that of Hurricane Harvey, which swamped Houston in 2017. Up to reers) of rain could fall in some spots, and “that would be record-setting in some locations,” Rappaport said in an interview Tuesday night.